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Hadrian
Empire and Conflict
Thorsten Opper
Harvard University Press, 2008

Even in the panoply of Roman history, Hadrian stands out. Emperor from 117 to 138 ad, he was at once a benevolent ruler and a ruthless military leader, known for his restless and ambitious nature, his interest in architecture, and his passion for Greek culture. This book moves beyond the familiar image of Hadrian to offer a new appraisal of this Emperor’s contradictory personality, his exploits and accomplishments, his rule, and his military role, against the backdrop of his twenty-one-year reign.

Lavishly illustrated with key works of art and objects, celebrated and little-known sculptures, bronzes, coins and medals, drawings, and watercolors from museums around the globe, the book conveys a vivid sense of the world Hadrian inhabited. Thorsten Opper shows the emperor from many angles—as a complex individual, as a military leader and strategist, as the amateur architect who created magnificent buildings such as his villa at Tivoli (an empire in miniature), as the lover who deified his male lover Antinous after his mysterious death in the Nile, and, finally, as the traveler who tirelessly roamed his empire and its boundaries.

From his place in Roman history to his legacy, which even makes its way into the popular culture of our day, the Hadrian who emerges from these pages is no longer larger than life; rather, he has all the depth and complexity, the color and shadings and detail of life itself.

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Hanging Together
Cooperation and Conflict in the Seven-Power Summits
Robert Putnam
Harvard University Press, 1984

For nearly a decade the leaders of the seven major industrial countries—the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and Canada—have met annually to discuss international economic and political issues. Regular summitry of this sort is virtually unprecedented in modern diplomacy. Proponents see the Western summits as providing collective leadership that is vital in a turbulent world, while critics dismiss summitry as distracting and even damaging to political and economic stability.

Hanging Together charts the modern dilemma between economic interdependence and national sovereignty. It assesses the history, decisions, successes, and failures of the seven-power summits from Rambouillet in 1975 to the 1983 meeting at Williamsburg, and looks forward to the 1984 summit in London. The authors show how the growing importance of international commerce and finance has caused national and international politics to become entangled, and how national borders have become more permeable. Born in an era of waning American hegemony, the summits reveal the tension between American leadership and collective Western management of the world economy. The authors also trace the struggles of heads of state to balance the conflicting imperatives of personal authority and bureaucratic expertise. Because summits involve the power and prestige of each country's highest authorities, summitry reveals in concentrated form how these conflicts are expressed and managed.

As a blend of contemporary history and political economy, Hanging Together demonstrates that summits are not isolated annual encounters, but part of a continuous process of international and domestic negotiation about the most important and controversial issues facing all governments today.

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Hanging Together
Cooperation and Conflict in the Seven-Power Summits, Revised and Enlarged Edition
Robert Putnam and Nicholas Bayne
Harvard University Press, 1987

For nearly a decade the leaders of the seven major industrial countries—the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and Canada—have met annually to discuss international economic and political issues. Regular summitry of this sort is virtually unprecedented in modern diplomacy. Proponents see the Western summits as providing collective leadership that is vital in a turbulent world, while critics dismiss summitry as distracting and even damaging to political and economic stability.

Hanging Together charts the modern dilemma between economic interdependence and national sovereignty. It assesses the history, decisions, successes, and failures of the seven-power summits from Rambouillet in 1975 to the 1983 meeting at Williamsburg, and looks forward to the 1984 summit in London. The authors show how the growing importance of international commerce and finance has caused national and international politics to become entangled, and how national borders have become more permeable. Born in an era of waning American hegemony, the summits reveal the tension between American leadership and collective Western management of the world economy. The authors also trace the struggles of heads of state to balance the conflicting imperatives of personal authority and bureaucratic expertise. Because summits involve the power and prestige of each country's highest authorities, summitry reveals in concentrated form how these conflicts are expressed and managed.

As a blend of contemporary history and political economy, Hanging Together demonstrates that summits are not isolated annual encounters, but part of a continuous process of international and domestic negotiation about the most important and controversial issues facing all governments today.

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front cover of Hinterland
Hinterland
America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict
Phil A. Neel
Reaktion Books, 2018
Over the last forty years, the human landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. The metamorphosis is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech, and the so-called creative class. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America’s hinterland, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead.

Urgent and unsparing, this book opens our eyes to America’s new heart of darkness. Driven by an ever-expanding socioeconomic crisis, America’s class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty, and production. The center has fallen. Riots ricochet from city to city led by no one in particular. Anarchists smash financial centers as a resurgent far right builds power in the countryside. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, from the Occupy movement to the wave of riots and blockades that began in Ferguson, Missouri, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail. Inaugurating the new Field Notes series, published in association with the Brooklyn Rail, Neel’s book tells the intimate story of a life lived within America’s hinterland.
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front cover of Hippocratic, Religious, and Secular Medical Ethics
Hippocratic, Religious, and Secular Medical Ethics
The Points of Conflict
Robert M. Veatch
Georgetown University Press, 2015

Where should physicians get their ethics? Professional codes such as the Hippocratic Oath claim moral authority for those in a particular field, yet according to medical ethicist Robert Veatch, these codes have little or nothing to do with how members of a guild should understand morality or make ethical decisions. While the Hippocratic Oath continues to be cited by a wide array of professional associations, scholars, and medical students, Veatch contends that the pledge is such an offensive code of ethics that it should be summarily excised from the profession. What, then, should serve as a basis for medical morality?

Building on his recent contribution to the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Veatch challenges the presumption that professional groups have the authority to declare codes of ethics for their members. To the contrary, he contends that role-specific duties must be derived from ethical norms having their foundations outside the profession, in religious and secular convictions. Further, these ethical norms must be comprehensible to lay people and patients. Veatch argues that there are some moral norms shared by most human beings that reflect a common morality, and ultimately it is these generally agreed-upon religious and secular ways of knowing—thus far best exemplified by the 2005 Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights—that should underpin the morality of all patient-professional relations in the field of medicine.

Hippocratic, Religious, and Secular Medical Ethics is the magnum opus of one of the most distinguished medical ethicists of his generation.

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